Robin Robertson's Swithering

Robin Robertson has played a crucial role for Scottish writers over the past two decades. As a fiction editor (he is now a Deputy Publishing Director) at Random House's Jonathan Cape imprint, he has been responsible for publishing several leading fiction writers including AL Kennedy, Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh, Gordon Legge, Janice Galloway, John Burnside and Duncan McLean, and his work in this area continues.

Robertson, originally from the North East of Scotland, began his editorial work at Penguin; he then developed a poetry list for Secker & Warburg in the late 1980s, where he published leading poets such as Peter Redgrove and Michael Longley, as well as debut collections by young writers such as Sarah Maguire, Michael Symmons Roberts and James Lasdun who have gone on to much success.

When he moved to Cape in the early 1990s, he persuaded them to take on the Secker list, and he developed the Cape imprint as one of poetry's most impressive lists, home to a small but weighty roster of British and Irish poets, plus a few big names from abroad (Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, Anne Carson).

Robertson was indirectly responsible for another poetry list. When Peter Strauss, former head at Picador, saw the manuscript for Robertson's own debut (many did not know Robertson was himself a poet), he decided to start publishing poetry under the Picador imprint. The resulting collection A Painted Field won three prizes, while Picador's list now vies with that from Faber as the most prestigious in UK publishing.

A third book of poetry named Swithering has recently appeared (following 2002's stately Slow Air – perhaps the best place to start for those new to his work) and is certainly the darkest and most direct of his collections so far, containing a higher number of personal poems, often touching on the half-remove of travel, or the pains of aging, moving sideways, letting be.

The style of Robin Robertson's poetry is cautious, quiet, the surface alive with small metaphors and elemental phrasings ('amnesia of snow', 'glossary of light'). When writing about nature, in particular, he invests short lines with a taut richness, as in this section from the start of 'What the Horses See At Night':

Swithering contains versions of poems by Neruda, Montale and Ovid ('The Death of Actaeon', mirrored by a lengthy original piece on the boyhood of a parallel Actaeon), as well as a couple of Robertson's trademark, knotty and visceral poems about sex ('The Glair' and 'Asparagus'). One of the most interesting poems here is this short piece about a hawk. In the back of the book, Robertson offers 16 notes, quite amazing for a poem of eight short lines! The piece is infused with the terminology of falconry, but works as it stands, nonetheless, and offers a good example of Robertson's meticulous style:

Mar-Hawk